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Fired by C.I.A., He Says Agency Practiced Bias

As a young case officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, Jeffrey Sterling says, he was eager to begin his first overseas posting, in Bonn, and he relished his secret assignment to recruit Iranians as spies.

After long hours spent on the Iranian desk at C.I.A. headquarters and nearly a year in language school learning Farsi, he felt that he was ready to put his training to use.

But after waiting two months for orders that never arrived, he said, he returned to the agency headquarters in Virginia in the fall of 1997 to ask his bosses why he had not been given any new cases.

The answer stunned him, he said.

According to Mr. Sterling, a supervisor on the Iran Task Force of the agency blurted out why he had not been given new assignments. As a ''big black man speaking Farsi,'' Mr. Sterling ''stuck out'' and would draw too much attention to the agency's secret Iranian agents. The supervisor, who is white, suggested that a black man, especially a tall athletically built black man like Mr. Sterling, could not meet secretly with Iranians without putting the agency's most sensitive Iranian cases at risk, Mr. Sterling said.

Mr. Sterling said he was a victim of racial discrimination throughout his career at the agency. He has been fired and has sued the agency, which vigorously denies the accusations.

Agency officials said they were prevented from responding to Mr. Sterling's specific statements by his refusal to waive his privacy rights. They said his dismissal stemmed from his refusal to accept a new assignment.

Mr. Sterling, 34 and unemployed, said that he was embittered by his experiences and that he believed he had never been given a fair chance to prove himself inside the agency's clubby atmosphere.

Agency officials and outside lawyers who handle cases against the agency said Mr. Sterling was the first black case officer to file a racial discrimination suit against the agency. Mr. Sterling said other black case officers shared his feelings but were afraid to speak up.

''I think they bring minorities in the door to maintain appearances, and so they can say they are diverse,'' he said of the agency. ''But that's just a facade.''

Although the agency has expressed a determination to become more diverse, white men have long dominated its top management. Since the agency started in 1947, every director, deputy director and chief of espionage operations has been a white man.

In the mid-1990's, the white male control over espionage faced its first major legal challenge from a class-action suit by a group of women who were case officers and who charged sexual discrimination. The women won a $990,000 settlement in federal court in 1995.

Mr. Sterling also said he believed that his experience showed how difficult it had been for the agency to adapt to a changing world.

The failure to develop more case officers from diverse backgrounds, he said, helped explain why the agency was unable to penetrate Al Qaeda's terrorist network before Sept. 11, while an American teenager, John Walker Lindh, was able to join the group.

''If a skinny white kid from the Bay Area can go up and knock on the door of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and be welcomed in, imagine what a nontraditional C.I.A. officer would have been able to do,'' Mr. Sterling said.

John Brennan, the deputy executive director of the agency who met Mr. Sterling several times about his case, said there was no evidence that racial discrimination had caused his problems.

''It was an unfortunate situation,'' Mr. Brennan said, ''because Jeffrey was a talented officer and had a lot of the skills we are looking for, and we wanted him to succeed.

''We were quite pleased with Jeffrey's performance in a number of areas. Unfortunately, there were some areas of his work and development that needed some improvement.''

In his suit, filed in August in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Sterling contends that he faced a pattern of discrimination throughout his career.

The challenge of Mr. Sterling's fitting in was complicated by the secretive nature of the agency, where even mundane personnel matters are classified.

Mr. Sterling contends that the managers retaliated against him after he had filed a complaint in 2000 with the antidiscrimination office at the agency over his treatment on his last field assignment, in the New York station. The agency, he said, ordered him to undergo a complete security reinvestigation two years ahead of schedule.

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In August 2000, Mr. Sterling was forced to leave the New York station. In March 2001, he was placed on administrative leave. He said he was subsequently discharged for refusing an assignment to return to the Iran Task Force, although agency officials said he refused other possible assignments, as well. He was let go in October.

Mr. Sterling and others familiar with his case said they believed that he and other young black case officers lacked mentors to help them navigate the byzantine world of espionage early in their careers.

Agency officials said they were working to improve recruiting and developing employees from minorities. About 12 percent of the professional staff members of the Directorate of Operations, the espionage arm where Mr. Sterling worked, are members of minorities, agency officials said.

''The agency has been very serious about diversity, and we have a very intense recruitment effort,'' said Don Cryer, a special assistant to the director of the agency, George J. Tenet, for diversity plans and programs. ''Our numbers are rising in all the key areas.''

Mr. Cryer said he had also met Mr. Sterling before his dismissal.

''The agency really did try to find a way to help Jeffrey be successful,'' Mr. Cryer said, ''because we truly did see him as an employee with potential.''

In fact, Mr. Sterling was just the sort of person whom the agency has said it wants to recruit.

Raised in Cape Girardeau, Mo., the youngest of six children, Mr. Sterling was the sole member of his family to go to college. After graduating from Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., he earned a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis. After that, he responded to a newspaper advertisement from the Central Intelligence Agency and was hired in 1993.

In December 1994, he completed training to become a case officer and joined the Iran Task Force in January 1995. He was the sole black officer there out of 20 to 30 professional staff members, he said. In that unit, Mr. Sterling traveled to Africa and Europe to work with Iranian agents.

After his training in Farsi, followed by another period at headquarters while he went through a divorce, Mr. Sterling was sent to Bonn in September 1997, assigned to recruiting Iranians as agents.

But, he said, his efforts to meet Iranian diplomats were hampered because his ''cover,'' the position he had to pretend to hold while operating for the C.I.A., was as an Army logistics officer. He said his superiors denied his request to switch him to a State Department cover, so he could pose as an American diplomat and move more freely among foreign officials.

While he handled one or two existing cases in Germany, he said, he was not given new cases to develop.

After meeting his supervisors in November 1997, when Mr. Sterling said he was told that he had not been given new cases because his appearance was a hindrance, he demanded that he be allowed to leave Germany, and he returned to headquarters.

After nearly a year in the counterproliferation division, Mr. Sterling transferred to New York in January 1999, where, he said, he was the lone black case officer.

Again, he was assigned to try to recruit Iranians as spies, and soon received a positive evaluation. Mr. Sterling ''demonstrated good tradecraft in the handling of his assigned cases,'' according to an evaluation in September 1999 by a supervisor and provided by Mr. Sterling.

But soon after that, managers in New York began to tell Mr. Sterling that they were disappointed by his failure to recruit Iranian spies. Mr. Sterling again complained that he had been given a cover as an Army officer and he again requested a State Department cover. Again, he said, that request was denied.

In April 2000, Mr. Sterling met his New York supervisors and was told that he had two months to start recruiting three new spies, and hold three meetings with each, or he would be forced to leave the station.

Mr. Sterling said he saw that as an unrealistic and unfair deadline and rejected the terms. He now says white case officers were routinely given more time to meet less demanding standards. He filed a complaint with the equal employment opportunity office at the agency and said he was soon notified that he would be subjected to a security investigation.

Robert Baer, a former case officer and the writer of a new book on his career at the agency, agreed that the demands put on Mr. Sterling for developing new agents were unreasonable.

''It's incomprehensible to me why any manager would give anyone a two-month limit,'' Mr. Baer said. ''That's an outrageous requirement. It often occurs that people go a whole tour of two or three years who don't recruit a single agent.''

Mr. Sterling said that perhaps the most depressing part of his experience occurred on Sept. 11, when the terrorist attacks occurred just as the agency was dismissing him.

''I was trained by the organization to counter enemies like that,'' he said. ''I had the language and area familiarization, but I was still not considered good enough.''

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A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2002, on Page A00013 of the National edition with the headline: Fired by C.I.A., He Says Agency Practiced Bias. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe